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Saturday, September 27, 2014

Cookie-Cutter People

“In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.”

Coco Chanel

The Town of Truro sent two of its paid flaneurs* to our house last week to appraise it for a revised tax
assessment. While one of them sauntered through the rooms snapping photos, I
mentioned to the other that our house might be difficult to evaluate easily
because it is unique. He explained that house assessments are determined by an
algorithm. Plug in the metrics and a computer spits out the valuation you are
taxed on.

“We don’t use the word ‘unique’ and you shouldn’t either,”
he told me soto voce. “Banks don’t
like to finance ‘unique’ dwellings because of resale.”

And there you have one of the significant shortcomings of
our society. Homogeneity.

We hear so much about the importance of being true to yourself,
of thinking outslde the box. But in practice, we’ve become cookie-cutter
people: from chain restaurants serving up taste-alike food to chain clothing
stores serving up look-alike fashions.

Did this ubiquitous and tedious conformity begin when we
started telling every child in the school that he or she was special? Did it
start when no kid left the playing field a loser?

This from Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari – and former boss
and mentor of Steve Jobs:

“A
lot of what is wrong with corporate America has to do with a culture filled
with antibodies trained to expel anything different. HR departments often want
cookie-cutter employees, which inevitably results in cookie-cutter solutions.”

In 1956, William H. Whyte published The Organization Man. It was regarded as a breakthrough
sociological commentary and became a bestseller because it so courageously described
what was happening on a mass scale to post-war American society: television, affordable
cars, fast food. Families were nuclear, and “following your bliss” led to planned suburban
communities like the 1950 California tract housing pictured above.

Whyte was alarmed by this phenomenon and he wanted us to be
alarmed, too. The American belief in the perfectibility of society, he wrote,
was shifting from one of individual initiative to one achieved at the expense
of the individual:

“Once
upon a time it was conventional for young men to view the group life of the big
corporations as one of its principal disadvantages. Today, they see it as a
positive boon.”

A few years later, Richard Yates published his first novel, Revolutionary Road, which was nominated
for the 1962 National Book Award. It illustrated the underbelly of Ward and
June Cleaver’s TV family: the idealized model of life-long career, two-child family
and sensible house in the suburbs.

In the in 2008 movie adaptation, frustrated housewife April
Wheeler tells her husband, Frank, in a pivotal scene:

“Our
whole existence here is based on this great premise that we're special. That
we're superior to the whole thing. But we're not. We're just like everyone
else! We bought into the same, ridiculous delusion.”

Today we have “politically correct” thinking. The late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used to call
it “fashionable consensus.” And it just might be more insidious than Whyte’s “group life” … because it has
morphed into “groupthink.”

Here’s April Wheeler again:

“Tell
me the truth, Frank. Remember that? We used to live by it. And you know what's
so good about the truth? Everyone knows what it is however long they've lived
without it. No one forgets the truth, Frank, they just get better at lying.”